What does this mean? Frankly, I don’t know yet. The contracts in question don’t actually expire until the end of June, and we have until then to sign the players we want to retain (and I’d think Lampard and Mark Schwarzer might be on that list) to new deals. In addition, the list isn’t even up to date — John Terry isn’t listed as under contract, merely considering an offer, for example.

To make a long story short, we still don’t know what’s happening with Lampard’s future and it probably isn’t the time to get riled up about a release list that won’t be final for more than a month. To make it even shorter, Kurt Zouma’s middle name is ‘Happy’, which is what you really should be taking away from this post.